Thankless because of the demands imposed on keeping a tight journal (which means whilst you all sleep coco pops away I’m up inventing clever dribble and uploading images after images of people who always seem to be too happy). But today I can tell you my task of being a society reporter has just become 17 notches more miserable. Why you wonder? Because I want every publicist who has ever had the good idea to find me to scratch me off their go to media list take a few steps back. Not because I don’t like publicists (I like quite a few of you if you must know) but because of the calculating nature of the way some of you behave and the conniving games so many of you relish in (but why?).

So let’s get to the meat of the matter. In the space of 7 days I, this scoundrel, received no fewer than 117 10 society event invitations as my capacity as a society reporter (whatever society means anymore and whatever it is us society reporters are suppose to do anymore…blah!). Out of those I probably I only bothered attending 3. Okay, so far we’re all happy. Now here’s where the jig comes in, during those same 7 days I also received 400 9 event post press releases with propaganda jargon and accompanying pictures, get ready to catch this- to events that I or the journal wasn’t invited to but passively expected to publish regardless.

So let’s get this straight, I get invites to events and if I feel as publisher we should cover them we do. But now not only am I getting the usual invites, I am now getting more ‘non invites’ to events that I wasn’t invited to attendsolely for the intent that some publicist can use me as a marketing conduit for their paying client.

This of course generally comes with a carefully worded tip sheet (cause we all need to metaphorically know the client has a penis 78 times bigger more cache than you and I could ever hope to have ) with select accompanying pictures of marvelously happy people. How they always manage to be happy beats me, but then again who can really understand the aspirations of most media whores? (milk the camera boy for as much public exposure then go on to hopefully milk an appearance deal or at least self justified social standing).

Now if you were in my position how would you respond? Would you acquiesce and just post said propaganda pieces (and I know quite a few of you bloggers that do, but I wont mention names this time, cause last time I embarrassed you all gave me dirty looks for weeks to come, but you copy and paste bloggers we all know who you are…) or would you do what I do – which is stand up for yourself?

Now the polite thing would be to ignore the emails and just pay them offending publicists no mind. But I am afraid as some of you have to come to find out, I don’t tolerate bad form too well (especially after one publicist had me unceremoniously thrown out of one event earlier this year and another threatened to sue mefor exercising my journalistic rights). And if I mustI will gather you up and expose your treacherous ways. Which reminds me about the phone call I received Sunday night (8.09pm) from a certain infamous paparazzo who I severed ties with in early October who threatened to beat the crap out of me (according to sources this is his usual way of intimidation, never mind the taped messages) if I went to press with a story documenting his shady crashing ways that most publicists can tell you about and have emailed me about (paparazzo the story will be up soon- promise).

Which brings me to the above arbitrary sample from one publicist. Let’s all read it together:

7 COMMENTS

Trust me as journalist/bloggers we’re not looking for a free party, we have many of our own to attend as well. What you’re missing is the dynamics of how most publicists essentially try and use most of us writers in media. It’s not very appealing and really at the end of the day most of the invites we get are in my opinion to irrelevant events for irrelevant people who think we are dying to attend and then go home and do these glamor write ups, with very most readers not even caring for the event, which means a negative return on our time and investment. Then again there is the odd story, entity that I will make a personal sacrifice for because I believe in their mission statement, but to be fed a pr story from a publicist the day after an event especially after we were not even given the option to attend is the new low in publicist behavior, who so many are in my opinion the new bottom feeders in media and the ones looking for a free party.